


Keep the Streets Empty (for Me)

by kiss_of_a_wave



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Divergence, Flashbacks, M/M, Mentions of other ships, Skinny! Steve (mentioned), non-canon compliant, non-civil war compliant, semi-resolved sexual tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-06 17:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6762472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiss_of_a_wave/pseuds/kiss_of_a_wave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blood roars in your ears, and he is terribly, terribly close, and you have never seen him like this in your life. There is nothing good you can do for him, and that makes you ache worse than all the punches you’ve taken since you were six. Soon he’s going to be gone, somewhere where you won’t be able to follow, and you may never see him again, and just like that, your life may be over. And all you can do is give him an answer, and pray it’s the one he wants to hear.</p><p>"Steve. What’s it gonna be?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. take me home before the storm

_Memories come when memory's old_  
_Following the stream up north __  
__**Where do people like us float?** _ ______

____________________________________

 

The first thing you learn is that there is always, always a greater enemy. This is true when you are six and it is still true when you are twenty-six.

When you were six, the kids who used to knock you around on the school yard were the most significant existential threats you could conceive of. Their jeers were the first thing you’d hear in the morning and the last thing you’d hear before falling asleep. That, and the sickening crunch that split through your skull when bone met gone, when some kid’s fist collided with the bridge of your nose.

Then one morning in June, when your six-year-old self had been at the very end of your small rope, he’d come out of nowhere, all arm and legs and grown-up curses. It was just after dawn on the last day before school let out for summer- you couldn’t make out his face at first, because he was a frenetic silhouette against the rising sun, so fast and unexpected that you weren’t sure he was real. You could not see his face, but you could see the bullies (all three of them) running fast in the opposite direction. Those particular three never touched you again. They weren’t the last kids to mess with you, not by a long shot, but that hot morning in June was the last time that anyone in your neighborhood saw you as fair game.

He’d pulled you up off the hot asphalt, and told you his name. It was a long, silly name, some dead president’s name, and he’d blushed angrily when he said it, and told you to call him something else.

One of the first things you’d learned, not the first, but one of the earliest, was that things can always get better. And that day you’d learned, even though you didn’t know it yet, that he of all people was on your side and always would be. You never knew why he picked you out to protect- you’d never asked, and he’d never offered. It became one of the steadfast, concrete facts in your life. The sun rises in the east, New York becomes unlivable between June and September, and Bucky had your back. Always, without you ever asking or expecting him to.

 

His fist collides with your shield, stays pressed against it for an endless moment, and you almost imagine you can feel the vibration of it snake up your arm and into your shoulder. Which is, of course, impossible, but really, that word doesn’t carry the same weight in 2014 that it did in 1944. Good, evil, friend, (dead, fallen, alive, irretrievable,) these words all meant something once, but with sirens screaming around you, chaos and carnage in the heart of Washington D.C. and blank blue eyes staring a hole through you but not really seeing you, it’s helpful to remember that this is not the same world you left behind. Maybe, you think madly as his shoulder (metal, cold, even through your clothes, and what the hell happened to his arm?) slams like a battering ram into your chest, the world you thought you lived in and fought for and died for never really existed at all.

You are relying more on defensive fighting techniques than going on the offensive. He’s a blur, a breeze that whirs by you, every bit the ghost that Natasha said he was, before you knew that the Winter Soldier was him. His uniform is a confusion of pouches and pockets, what little you can see as moves like lightning around you. Any of those compartments could be hiding knives, firearms, grenades, or any of the other small weapons of mass destruction that Hydra (or S.H.E.I.L.D) has concocted in the years since the war. You know nothing about your opponent, so it’s best to stay as far away from him as possible. Defense, not offense.

And who taught you that? A fist, flesh and blood and bone rather than metal, connects neatly with your jaw. You reel back, and the shield slips in your grasp. You do not drop it, but it’s a very near miss. He’ll kill you, is trying hard to kill you, and even though that should not be possible, you keep a death grip on the shield. Because his strength is inhuman now, even compared to your own, and without your shield you do not think you’d stand a chance against it. For the first time since the serum turned you into something different altogether, something barely-human, you feel that you’ve met a match.

He was always strong, but not like this. The strength transcends the arm, speaks of some more significant change, something that they’d done to him. You distance yourself from him as much as you can, setting your legs apart. Both to steady yourself, and to get a better look at his face. Like a child, you cling to the dim hope that maybe, just maybe, you’re eyes deceived you, and it’s not really him after all. Either that, or he’ll get a good look at you as you take a closer look at him, and he’ll know you.

Everything about his face is the same, just like it was the last time you saw him. Everything but his eyes. Those eyes, familiar and wide and as blue as they ever were, bore straight into you and they’re so hard and cold that you feel they might freeze you where you stand. You blink once, hard, and wonder, not for the first time, if you’ve lost your mind. From the crash, from being lost in the ice, from watching the city you’d loved as a child nearly destroyed by gods and monsters. Surely you have lost your mind, finally- there is no other way to explain Bucky, alive and fighting you, trying to kill you, and staring at you the way a snake looks at a mouse. Looking straight at you, and not knowing you.

But you close your eyes once, and open them again, and he is still there. You haven’t imagined him. He pauses and focuses that icy stare on you again, and you pray or those eyes to warm with recognition. You pray for this harder than you’ve prayed for anything since he day you’d clung to the side of a train at the end of the world and willed his hand to stay firmly in yours. When it had slipped out of you grasp, in a moment of weakness you’d prayed to join him.

There is a flicker of something across the closed expanse of his face. Confusion, pain, recollection. It doesn’t matter, because the flicker fades as quickly, and he lunges at you again with a wordless snarl, and again you use your shield against the awful, unnatural strength he now possesses. Against that arm, that makes him seem more like a machine and less like the man you’d watched fall.

You block and kick and dodge his blows. There’s an animal grace to the way he fights, an effortlessness and economy of movement ( _but that was always kind of your style, wasn’t it, Buck? _) and you know with sudden clarity that you cannot kill him. You may not even be able to wound him or slow him down. All of your training and all of you innate instinct disintegrates to nothing. None of it prepared you for this, for him. For what they’ve turned him into.__

____

____

Something silver flashes out of the corner of your eye. A knife, black-handled, military grade and probably sharp as a surgical instrument, flashes in his hand. His flesh and blood hand, the real one. He is completely capable of killing you. And in that moment, you are nearly willing to let him.

\-------------------------------------------------

_It is 1942._

 _“This is getting ridiculous,” Bucky hisses. He pushes away slowly from the brick wall he was leaning against, eyes never wavering from yours. “Naw, you know what, strike that. It’s been ridiculous. I think you’ve finally crossed the line into suicidal, you moron.” He reaches up to absently wipe at the blood dripping from his nose. Three guys, all of them pretty big, and still you’d only seen him take one single hit to the face. Three guys, all of them built and mad and he’s not even really breathing hard. Meanwhile you feel like you’ve inhaled fire and run a mile. It’s all as familiar to you as waking up in the morning, there’s no point in feeling bitter or envious._

_This is how it goes: you piss some guy off. There are many, many different ways you can do this, none of which really matter in the end. So the guy is pissed, and maybe he has a friend with him who’s as itching to fight as he is. Soon your back against the wall, backed into a corner, with a storm of fists in your face, a curse on your lips, and lungs starting to burn like fire. Your punches seem to bounce off the guy like they’re nothing._

_And it always happens, just like this: just when you think that this is it, this is the guy that’s going to kill you, there’s a blur out of the corner of your eye, and a hand pulls you attacker back by the collar and a fist slams into the guy’s jaw so hard there’s a sound like snapping wood. And as you watch them fight, you realize the guy wasn’t even really trying when he was taking a swing at you. Hell, he didn’t need to, not when a stiff wind in a cold winter could knock you flat. But Bucky never throws a punch that he doesn’t mean, and it’s not often that he throws a punch that’s not on your behalf._

_It never ceases to amaze you how quickly these fights get done with. He makes quick work of the guy’s two friends, like they were nothing._ /p>

_Bucky straightens in front of you, the old slow smirk creeping across his face, and you see through the mask, deep into something that he probably doesn’t want you to see. It’s not something you’ve ever talked about, but watching him take down three guys like it’s nothing drives it home. There’s a rage in him, somewhere deep and dark, behind the slow smiles and easy drawls. You don’t know why is there, but it’s written in his eyes, in the brutally taught lines of his body as he fights._

_If he ever went for me, you think (and it’s an odd thing to think, you fully admit) that if he ever turned those fists on you, he could kill you without breaking a sweat._

_You blink blood and sweat and the thought away. There’s a dull ache in your head and in your jaw where the guy slugged you. It occurs to you that you’re lucky that his friends didn’t feel the need to step in this time. The pain is making you dizzy, making your thoughts whirl in crazy directions. No way in hell Bucky would ever dream of taking a swing at you, of all people. You’ve taken lot of hits in your time, but this one must’ve hit home worse than others._

_Your laugh is quick and there’s a hysterical edge to it that you hope he doesn’t hear. Still, he raises an eyebrow at you. “What the hell’s so funny?” He’s absently brushing is clothes off, which really is funny, because he barely even looks like he’s been in a fight. Sometimes you think he just puts on the act for you benefit. To make it look like you’re on something like an even keel._

_It's hard not to stare at him, but that’s nothing new. What’s harder is to hold your tongue around him. There’s almost nothing in the world you can’t or wouldn’t share with him. “Nothing,” you mutter, whipping at the blood on your mouth. The lip is already swollen and bleeding, but what else is new? In spite of the sting you grin at him. “How is it you always pop up out of nowhere when I get into a fight? What do you do, check every alley you walk by to make sure I’m not up against a wall, getting my ass handed to me?” With some effort you straighten up, painfully, and spit blood on the grimy alley floor. You wait for him to grin at you and return the jibe._

_He doesn’t, which should really be your first indication that he’s off, somehow._

_When your eyes find his again, there’s a pained look on his face. It’s closed and distant and angry. The anger you saw earlier was nothing new, nothing you hadn’t seen in him a thousand times. It was fascinating, that quick, hot rage; but this cold gaze makes you feel uneasy. He’s looking at you, right at you, but it’s like he’s never seen you before in his life. Suddenly your palms are damp, your hands shaky, and you clear your throat roughly. To steady yourself, and maybe to snap him out of whatever fight-induced fugue he’s in. To remind him that you’re still there. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” you ask. You try to roughen your voice, because tenderness has never gotten you or anyone else any points with Bucky._

_His head snaps up, and when his eyes find yours the chill is gone, but there’s still something closed about his face. He blinks hard at you. “What are you gonna do when I’m gone?” he asks, words quick and hard as bullets._

_You frown at him. “What do you mean?” you ask, feeling like an idiot, or a child. With him looking at you like that, suddenly your face is hot and you’re aware of every ache and scrape, of the dull burn at the base of your throat. There was an edge of hysteria in your question, unmistakable, but you hope to God Bucky didn’t hear it._

_He snorts, instantly dismissive, but you don’t miss the tremor in his hand when he runs it through his sweat-soaked hair. It’s not shaking from fatigue. “C’mon, Steve. You know damn good and well what I’m talking about. How long do you really think it’s going to be before they ship me off to France, England, wherever?”_

_This is not the first time you’ve thought about it. You aren’t an idiot. But it still sucks the air out of your lungs, the thought of him being shipped off to God knows where. To die, or to kill, probably both. It’s not just that he’ll be gone- it’s that you know that they’ll never take you. Even if you beg them, and you’re sure as hell not above that, but it’ll never happen. Neither of you have ever gotten the hang of being apart._

_And you, you never really learned to back down from a fight. Any fight._

_Bucky stalks toward like a cat itching for a fight, eyes hot and narrow. “You know as well as I do that it’s not gonna be real long. Sooner rather than later.” His voice is low, almost a snarl. It hurts your neck as you crane it up to look him in the eye. Then, lightning quick, he shoves you hard with the flat of his palm. It knocks the air out of you, but you’re just barely able to catch yourself before you end up flat on your back._

_The fuck was that for?” you sputter, words running together into an exclamation of shock and hurt._

_He doesn’t back down and he doesn’t apologize, just steps closer to you, until he’s got you pressed against the alley’s brick wall. “You have two options,” he murmurs. Somewhere a car backfires and there’s an unmistakable chime of shattering glass. Bucky doesn’t seem to notice, and in that moment the only thing that is real to you are his eyes, blue and narrowed and brutally focused on your face. The chill is gone from them- now you feel like they could burn a hole through you. It’s unnerving, but it’s familiar. “Two choices: either you cut out this stand-your-ground comic book hero bullshit, or” he shoves you again, harder this time. Your back slams against the alley wall, but you don’t make a sound, and you don’t tear your eyes from his. “Or, you let me show you how to fight. At least how to not get killed. Because I swear to God, Steve, I’m not going to off to rot in a trench somewhere in Europe knowing that you’re in a back alley getting your head bashed in.”_

_Blood roars in your ears, and he is terribly, terribly close, and you have never seen him like this in your life. There is nothing good you can do for him, and that makes you ache worse than all the punches you’ve taken since you were six. Soon he’s going to be gone, somewhere where you won’t be able to follow, and you may never see him again, and just like that, your life may be over. And all you can do is give him an answer, and pray it’s the one he wants to hear._

_"Steve. What’s it gonna be?”_

**\------------------------------------------**

The year is 2014. He does not know you.

His face, every line of it, is seared into your brain. You cannot say for certain that you dreamed in the ice, but you know that if you did, the dreams were all his face, this face, and everything it meant to you. But you say his name, the word making your lips feel numb and slow, and he looks at you with dead eyes and he doesn’t know who you are.

Glass breaks somewhere above you both. There are sirens screaming everywhere around you. It’s not as bad a New York, but the bedlam around you (which you feel more than see, because all you really see is him) isn’t something that should be happening in America. The wrongness of it vibrates straight into your bones. This is not what you fought, died, and came back for.

He was always fast, even when you were kids and he was knocking the bully of the week on his ass for your benefit, but never like this. He slams his metal fist into you shield, almost knocking you down. You block him, ducking away from is blows. He is stronger and faster than anyone or anything you’d faced since the serum- you are not sure that you can fight him at all, and survive. So you duck away from him, the way he’d taught you to do in an alley seventy years ago.

_**“You have to get a feel for the guy. If he’s a lot bigger than you, don’t even try to hit him. Just duck and keep ducking, ‘til he gets tired or bored.” He’d flashed a grin at you. “Or until I find you and finish him off for you, princess.”** _

Your head is not in this fight the way that it should be- his fist (flesh and blood and bone, or you’d be dead) slams into your sternum. There’s a crack, but thankfully not the sick snap of broken bone, and your vision swims, and you lose balance. The metal of his arm glints in the sunlight. The star on his bicep is red as blood, and your eyes fix on it as you struggle to will the pain away and lift your shield to guard your vulnerable face away from another blow. He is trying to kill you- Bucky is back from the dead, maybe never having died at all, and he’s back where you can see him and touch him if he’d just stay still, and he is trying to kill you. In another world he’d saved your life so many times you’d lost count. From starvation, when the Depression hit hard and it was just the two of you. From despair, all the brutal winters and boiling summers when the air itself poisoned you, and you were too sick to move and he forced you to stay alive through sheer will and determination. Made you eat, made you laugh, made you feel like something more than a piece of defective machinery.

He saved your life in an alley. At the time he didn’t realize that’s what he was doing, but it was. Even though you were small and weak, he taught you how to fight. He gave you the raw materials, and it wasn’t very long before you were able to use those materials, and since the no one and nothing has been able to stand against you.

No one until him, and even you have to admit that there’s something fitting about that.

You throw a punch. It misses its mark. You try to kick his legs out from under him. He dodges you. You want make him stand still, to take him by the shoulders and shake him. _What I know, I learned from watching you. I am alive now, when I should have died a lifetime ago, because of you. Because you refused to let me die, or to let me get myself killed._

There is nothing that you would not give to stop time, to stop his fists, to freeze you both and to force him to look at you, if only for a second. Because after all is said and done you have faith in simple truths, and you believe with every fiber of who you are and what you’ve become that if he could just see you he would know you and he would stop. Whatever has been done to him can be undone. Whatever they’ve turned him into can be unmade, with the real him re-made. That has to be possible because the very fact that he is here and alive and fighting is itself impossible, and impossibility has to go both ways. .

(You really are a very, very simple man: all your life, before and after the ice, you have always been able to reduce ever problem or obstacle into a simple statement of cause and effect, almost like an equation. If such is such way, then life is perfect.

**If** you were healthy-

**If** your father hadn’t died in the war-

**If** Mom had never started taken shifts at the TB ward-

**If** Bucky had never gone to war-

**If** you hadn’t let go of his hand-)

And you way of thinking is as simple it ever was. If he would look at you and know you then you could stop this little war. The two of you could stop this whole thing. Because surely if he had control of his senses and knew you he would fight with you instead of against you, and he would turn those knives and rifles against Hydra, with you. There was nothing that the two of you couldn’t do together. Even after the serum, you’d been more together than apart. To the world you are invincible: a super soldier, a perfect hero or a perfect killing machine. But these people, friends and enemies alike, they do not know you, do not know that you were strong even before the serum. That even when you were small he had made you feel large, and that even for all your unnatural strength you have been lost and weak without him.

Look at me, you beg him silently. With eyes instead of words, because you can barely even hear your own thoughts over the noise. _Look at me, and remember yourself, and remember me. Make me invincible again. Do this and I swear, we can fight them together, you and me, like it’s always been, and I’ll find every last person who’s done this to you, if they’re still alive-_

There’s another crushing blow to your face, from the human fist. Pain vibrates through your jaw, dizzying in its intensity, but just for a second you imagine that his skin was warm against your face. And when your min should really be focused on taking him down, and getting out of this alive, you are shaken by the realization that this is the first time in seventy years that he has touched you. Skin to skin.

It all stops, like the needle being dragged violently from the surface of a record. He is not fighting, and you are not fighting. Then he is gone and you never had a chance to see where he went (who took him,) and you are on the concrete on your aching knees, with a gun pressed against you scalp. There are voices all around, but they fade into the din of screeching brakes and sirens. Your eyes scan around for him, for metal in the sunlight, but he’s gone as fast as he’d appeared.

You have lost your senses. He was trying to kill you in the service of something huge and terrible, and he does not know or remember you, and has left you to the mercy of the same enemy that the two of you had fought against a lifetime or two ago. But you must be insane, because the pain and fear are dulled to numbness by the fact that he is alive. Out of his mind and out of control, but here.

Someone jerks you up roughly and hustles you into a van. They are going to take you, and Natasha, and Sam, to God knows where, where they will do God knows what to the three of you, and you should be shaking with rage or fear or both. But you are still and calm, and you crane your neck around behind you, praying for a glimpse of him, when the van’s back door slides shut.

The van pulls away from the curb fast and you’re finally still long enough to take inventory of your injuries. The fight left you comparatively unscathed, but you’re now abundantly aware of the way your bones seem to grind against your joints. You make note of these things absently. A thick cloud of grief and hope anesthetizes you. Training and instinct should have you fighting against your restraints, livid, afraid of facing an enemy that’s so large you can’t begin to understand it.

Natasha is a warm, brooding pressure beside you. She hasn’t said a word since you were shoved in the van together, and she’s angled her body in such a way that you’re sure she’s taken a hit of some kind, though you can’t see for sure. She’s staring straight ahead at nothing while Sam’s eyes dart around frantically for some chance for escape. There’s a sharp pang of guilt at having dragged him into this mess. It would seem that being your friend, or being close to you at all, has become a dangerous thing.

_**“Who the hell is Bucky?’** _

Blood roars in your head and your whole body burns, from the top of your head to your fingertips.

“He didn’t know me,” you murmur. To Sam and Natasha, to yourself. “He looked right at me, and he didn’t know me.” The words sound like they should be coming out of the mouth of a child, but that’s what you feel like. Like a child.

“You’re sure it was him?” Sam asks. His voice is tight and restrained, deadly calm. Ever the soldier. “Positive?”

“Uh,” you start, instantly regretting the tremor in your voice. You pause, regain control. You owe it to the both of them to not lose control. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m positive.”

_I’ve seen his face in nearly every dream I’ve had._

Natasha doesn’t say anything, but her entire body stiffens against the seat. “S’not really him, Steve,” she mutters. There’s a tightness in her voice, an edge of pain and restraint. “May look like him, sound like him, but for all intents and purposes, that’s not him.” The van jerks sharply to the right, and she hisses in pain. “He’s a killing machine. Has been for decades, assuming it’s been him all along.” You are able to angle yourself just right and you manage to catch a glimpse of the red that’s spreading out around her shoulder.

Every inch of you should be throbbing after the beating he gave you. But you’re numb to everything but the mounting panic at the sight of Natasha’s wound, heavy guilt, and a sense like falling. Like you’re spiraling downward, towards something cold and black and final. It’s like so many dreams you’ve had- there’s nothing concrete to hold onto, and even if there were, you’re not sure that you have the will to grip it.

The van gains speed. There are no windows in the van so there is no way to know where they are taking the three of you. Depending on whether or not there’s a use for her, they will probably kill Natasha. You have no idea what they have in store for Sam, or for you.

What can they do to you? They’ve already done the worst they could.

You clear your throat. “He wasn’t. Bucky wasn’t like that.” Which is a ridiculous thing to say, so you clarify. “I mean, they did something to him. To make him like this. Zola experimented on him before I found him during the war. Whatever he did to him must’ve helped him survive the fall.” And set him down the path to becoming a killing machine.

Natasha’s able to read people like books, you’ve come to realize. Everything about you, your body language, your tone of voice, is never lost on her. At first that ability had made you uncomfortable, but now you’ve come to expect it and even rely on it. She sucks in a breath through gritted teeth, sighs. “There’s nothing you could have done, Steve. We’ve all read the files. On you, and on Barnes. Nothing about this is your fault.”

“I should’ve looked for him. Harder.” Your voice does not crack as you say it, a fact for which you are embarrassingly grateful. You stare down at your hands. “When he fell. I did, some. But they said there was no way that he could’ve survived the fall. But I should’ve looked for him harder. He would have looked for me.” If you had found him, Hydra would not have found him.

When you look up, Sam is eyeing you. “You’re going to want to shut down that line of thought, Steve,” he says slowly, evenly. His eyes don’t leave yours. “To be continued, when we get out of here.”

You tune out some, after that. You’re vaguely aware of Sam turning to the masked guard beside him, demanding that someone put pressure on Natasha’s wound before she bleeds out. Then there’s a blue glow and a crackle of electricity, and just like that the three of you are out of Hydra’s hand again. Like everything else lately, it happens so fast you don’t have time to process it. You’re not being delivered into the hands of the enemy, but you are no longer sure you’re being taken to friends, either.

You had one friend, only one. And like so many things in your life, you let him slip through your fingers. You were not fast enough. It has been seventy years, and you still have the sinking feeling that you are still out of time.

**\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------**

_The air is getting warmer, heavier, even as the sun slips below the rooftops. It is the first day of June, and already your clothes are sticking sickly to your skin. You are breathing hard and painfully (but what else is new?) and so is Bucky. But he looks n sounds like himself again, and you no longer feel like you’re falling. There is still an oddness between you, an oddness that’s never been there before, and for some idiot reason you are having a difficult time meeting his eye. You tell yourself that it’s because he is standing so close to you, though your skin pricks at the lie as soon as you think it._

It is 1942. _You suck in a breath, and lift your shoulder in a shrug that you hope looks natural. “Show me what you’ve got,” you say carefully. It’s what he wants to hear, and it’s the only thing you can give him. It will make him feel better to feel like you’re not flying blind without him._

_His grin is instantaneous. It makes him look younger than he is, and it makes the back of your neck feel hotter all of the sudden. “Atta boy,” he says, very much himself again. He’s nothing if not dramatic so you expect that there’s going to be some lecture that precedes this lesson, some lofty statements made about fighting and self-defense. As such you’re not expecting him to back up quickly and shove you from the side, pushing you back farther into the alley. You don’t lose your footing and humiliate yourself, which is a pretty significant point in your favor._

_Humiliate yourself? When have you ever been embarrassed in front of Bucky?_

_"So what’s rule one of fighting?”_

_You squint at him. “Uh. Hit for the throat?”_

_Bucky opens his mouth, then closes it. “Nope. When you can, run the fuck away. Always.” He holds up a hand when you start to object. “Steve, c’mon. I know you’re inclined to defend the honor of everyone everywhere and that’s not changing anytime soon, so you’ve gotta compromise somewhere.”_

_You can’t help but make a face at that. He knows as well as you that you’re biologically incapable of backing down from a fight. But you’re doing this for him, at least partially, so he feels better about leaving. It’s not the moment to correct him. “So what’s rule two?”_

_"You’ve gotta learn how to block,” he says without introduction. He stalks toward you, and you brace somewhat. “Like this” He jerks your arm up roughly and demonstrates by knocking his fist lightly against you. “See, that’s where you always get in trouble. You let ‘em get at your face. Seems like you’ve had a black eye more often than not since we were ten.”_

_"Never had much of a choice,” you mutter, scowling at him. It’s dark enough that you can barely make out his face. His gaze is strangely hot, eyes almost feverish as much as you can see them. In the dying light they look nearly black. He grins._

_"Okay, so you run your mouth off in your usual fashion, Dick takes offense. He takes a swing at you. He’s too close to block, too fast, and you’re not in a position to cut and run.” Never taking his eyes off of yours, he balls his hand into a fist. “So you’ve gotta take him on. Where do you let him have it?”_

_"Um. His jaw?”_

_He shakes his head. “Nope.” Suddenly his face is an inch from yours. Close enough that you can feel the heat of his body, even through your clothes, an observation that is both distracting and odd given the circumstance. “Get him in the throat. Works every time.” He lands a weak mock-punch to your neck, scraped knuckles against your pulse. “Hurts like a bitch, and it’ll knock the wind out of him. Gives you enough time to get the hell out of dodge.”_

_Bucky is still standing nearly on top of you. It would be an incredible invasion of your personal space, if either of you paid attention to that kind of thing. You tilt your head up to him, trying to focus in the creeping dark. “Wait a sec, Buck. You always go for the jaw. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get a guy in the throat.”_

_"That’s because I don’t need to,” he says immediately, slow grin creeping across his face. The cockiness of it is so overwhelming that were he anyone else in the world, you’d want to deck him. “That’s what makes you, you, and me, me.”_

_His easy arrogance has always made you uncomfortable. What he sees as a strength you’ve seen as a potential vulnerability, but for the first time in a long time you’re glad he’s the way he is. He’ll need it on the front._

_For the next hour (or hours, or minutes, you lose track of time when he’s like this) he shows you how to not get your ass killed, when he’s gone. Both of you know that you’re not going to come out of this lesson a street fighter, but even you have to admit you learn something about inherent strengths and weaknesses. A potential opponents, and your own. He shows you how to kick, how to dodge, how to knock a guy’s legs out from under him. By the end you can feel sweat running down your back and your lungs are starting to burn, but Bucky is himself again, and something about that mitigates all the little aches and pains._

_Eventually he hears you wheezing and the alley is almost completely dark, so you call it quits. The only light is the weak orangey glow that comes from the windows above you and the sickly streetlights on the curb. Even though you’re both pouring sweat, he throws an arm around your shoulders. As the two of you wind your around trash cans and rotten wooden pallets that were knocked around in the fight. “Review. What’s rule one?”_

_You roll your eyes even though you know he can’t see it. “Run the fuck away.”_

_"That’s my boy,” he drawls, and you give him a little shove as you step out into the street._

_It never occurs to you, not once while he’s showing you the ropes, to ask him where he learned how to fight. It’s just something that he was born to do, just like you were born to draw and read and mouth off when you really shouldn’t. Fighting is part of him, and the violence that comes with it is part of him too, even though the thought makes you uncomfortable. He is the only home you have ever had for long, and you learned to stop questioning anything about him a long, long time ago. _And this dim longing that's hounded you will fade, like things do.__

**\----------------------------------------------------**

It’s odd, the way your memory works anymore. Sometimes you barely remember what year it is, or when you fell asleep the night before. But you remember that night in June. The burn in your lungs and the burn in his eyes, the exhilaration mixed with fear. It never occurred to you to question the burning in your face and throat when Bucky was too close to you. It never occurred to you to ask him how he knew to fight, and it also never occurred to you to ask what he was afraid of. Fear wasn’t something that came to him naturally, before the war. That, you remember.

Born to fight. Born to fight and maybe even born to kill, but not like this. Not in the service of people like this.

You do not want to chance talking to Natasha about is. Her ability to transition between callousness and compassion continues to unnerve you. She is changeable as day and you are never sure who you are dealing with at any given moment. It is possible that she is becoming more consistent, at least with you, but you can’t be sure. There is no longer any doubt in your mind that you would trust her with your life, for whatever that’s worth. But you do not think you can trust her to spare you from the truth, to tell you what you want to hear. In a very real sense, Natasha has been where you are standing- she knows what it’s like to look into the eyes of someone who should know you, and does not. Even so, you do not know how far she was willing to pull Clint back to her. The time may come when you will feel comfortable asking, but that day is not today. As it is you do not know what your plan is for getting him back, or if you even have a plan.

You stare out across the river, at the sprawl of the city. He is alive, and he is out there somewhere. The two of you are in the same city and the same country and the same world. The thought nearly makes your knees tremble. You’re caught between a hopelessness that makes you feel like you’re falling and a desperate elation that you know is dangerous.

He’s been corrupted. Twisted, warped. Blasphemed in a way, even though you know that’s over-dramatic. But he is alive and you are alive. You died once and came back to life in an age of miracles, and the mere fact that he is alive and breathing means that something can be done. That his story and yours isn’t meant to end yet.

For a soldier, Sam is incredibly quiet. You surround yourself with spies and assassins anymore, so you’ve become used to people appearing close to you before you can hear them coming. You feel him beside you before you hear the soft crunch of his boots on the concrete. He is very still beside you, doesn’t force his presence. He clears his throat. “You don’t need to spill the whole story. Some of it I already know. The rest you’ll tell me when you’re ready,” he says evenly.

It is strange, and foreign, to feel immediate and easy trust for someone. Not for the first time today you are ridiculously grateful that Sam is here. You had forgotten what it was like to be around someone who speaks the exact same language as you. It’s been seventy years.

He leans forward, resting his elbows on the concrete rail. “All I need is for you to tell me what you’re going to do.”

You can’t help but smile at that. _I don’t know what I’m going to do, Sam. Tell me. Tell me what I should do._ You sigh, and rub at your eyes with the back of your hand. There is no point in talking in circles. Not with him. “I can’t kill him, Sam.”

He pauses before nodding slowly. “Alright.”

“You think I’m nuts.”

“Naw, I know you’re not nuts,” he says immediately, shaking his head and smiling slightly. And because it’s Sam, you believe him. “You just need to be ready, Steve. For whatever happens.”

There’s an urge to explain it to him, all of it. It is not easy to share these things with people, not in the 21st century, but you have an odd and persistent feeling that there is no reason to hide yourself from Sam. “Bucky-“

“May not really exist anymore,” he says gently. “At least not in the way you’re thinking. I saw him too, Steve. Whatever these guys have done to him, it runs deep. And unless he was on ice as long as you were, they’ve had many, many opportunities to condition him.” He leans forward and turns to meet your eyes. His are gentle, no trace of condescension. “I’m not saying that this thing is hopeless, but there might not be a whole lot of him left.”

You let that process for a moment. All he’s done is put what you’ve been thinking and dreading into words. But you really haven’t changed at all over the years. And back in Brooklyn, even before the war, you were a champion at not letting yourself think of things that were too painful for too long. There are things that you have the power to change, and then there’s everything else. You have to tell yourself that Bucky hasn’t fallen into the everything else category. You clear your throat roughly. “Say you didn’t have a whole lot growing up. Almost nothing. Nothing, and no one. Not really. A mom, a nurse, always away at the hospital, working herself literally to death. A father, dead in the first war, who you never knew. You follow?” you ask, embarrassed by the sound of your own voice, at the desperate hopefulness in it.

Sam nods, slowly. “Yeah, I follow.”

“Okay, so. You have one friend,” you say, and will your voice not to crack, because these words and this particular hurt haven’t seen the light of day for a human lifetime. “Only one. And that one friend, he’s not just a friend. He’s everything and everyone that a person can be to another. Best friend and brother and sort of parent, after a point. Looks out for you, stands up for you, fights for you.”

Believed in you when no one else did. Saw you when you were invisible.

To his credit, Sam does not look at you like you’re insane, because as hard as you try that hysterical edge has crept into your voice and you know you are rambling. But Sam just looks straight ahead and nods, leaning against the railing. “Okay.”

You swallow hard because your mouth has gone bone dry and you aren’t sure if the two of you have been standing here for ten minutes or an hour. “Then, almost from one second to the next, just like that, you lose that person.” That person is taken from you. “That,” you pause, and your voice does crack this time, “that everything person, is gone, just like that. Like he’d never been there at all. Maybe you could have prevented it, if you’d been faster or smarter.” Sam opens his mouth, probably to object to what you said, but you keep going and he closes it again. “So now you’re alone, really alone, but you can’t give up or quit fighting because if you do all the times that he fought for you, just to keep you alive, were for nothing. So you keep fighting, even though you don’t always want to, but you keep fighting because he would have liked or you too. And you wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for him.”

Even though it took everything in you not to throw yourself off that train after him, because you never really did get the hang of being apart from him.

Sam’s squinting at you now, with sympathy and something akin to pain. He does not say anything, but you see his mind processing the things you’ve told him.

“Then, it turns out that your, uh, everything-person, isn’t gone after all. But he’s been changed, maybe changed into something else altogether. But he’s alive, and if he’s been unmade once, maybe you can re-make him, get through to him. Maybe you can start over.” You pause and draw in a long, shaking breath, not sure if you feel better or worse or telling Sam these things. “Could you kill that person, Sam? Even if reason and training said you had to?”

He sighs heavily, and leans back, still staring out into the Potomac. He shakes his head. “No, Steve. Don’t think I could.”

You nod slowly, more relieved than you should be.

Sam surprises you by chuckling softly. “You know, they don’t mention any of that in the history books. I mean, they sort of touched on it. But there wasn’t anything like that,” he says slowly, sobering. “I’d say I’m sorry, Steve, but I sorta think that doesn’t cover it.”

“I,” you begin, but you still don’t trust your voice. Instead you nod, and try not to look at him.

“He doesn’t know you,” Sam says, not unkindly. “He may never recognize you.”

“He will,” you say quickly, with surprising calm. The words are out of your mouth before you realize that you believe it. Either he will know you, remember you, let his brain be healed and whole again, or he won’t. And if he cannot come back to you, then you will get as close to him as you can, and you will let him kill you. You will fight him only to a certain point, and then only because you promised him once, in an alley in another city and another lifetime, that you would never go down without a fight.

So, you will not kill him. You do not and will not tell Sam this, though he’s smart enough that he’s surely extrapolated from what you’ve said that you would be functionally incapable of killing Bucky. He will try to kill you and you are prepared to let him try and possibly succeed, because your life such as it is doesn’t mean as much to you as his life means.

How many times between his fall and yours had you thought that you’d be willing to shear off ten, twenty years of your own life, just to have him for another year, another hour? At the end of the day you never really got used to being apart from him, not after he left war, not after you watched him fall. There has been a wrongness to every hour you’ve lived without him. If nothing else, that alien loneliness and sick longing vanished the moment you saw his eyes peering at you over the mask. Even if he doesn’t know you, and never does, those were the same, and you could never forget them, never even tried.

You suit up, realizing that you’re almost certainly heading into your final battle. Of all the perils you’ve thrust headlong into, this is the one from which you are fairly certain you aren’t going to come back from. And yet there’s an abiding sense of peace about you, of resolution, because this is the first fight you’ve fought since 1945 that you feel like you’ve got a reason to be fighting. That reason is in this city right now, somewhere, likely preparing to kill you. That particular detail doesn’t really matter, because he is alive, and at least for the time being so are you. Both of you survived the war in different yet markedly similar ways, and yet the war never really ended for either of you. If this is the final battle, just between the two of you, then there’s a rightness to it. It’s not so much that you are fighting for your life against him- you are fighting for both of your lives, against the same thing that ripped you both apart once, a lifetime or more ago.

Anyway, you think as you slip on your mask, he’s saved your life more times than you can count. If he does not remember any of that, and chooses to take your life this time, then you’re willing to let him.

**\-------------------------------------------------**

_"So, what if a guy pulls out a knife in the middle of a fight? Or a gun?”_

_Bucky grins at you, teeth too-white in the growing dark. “Who around here’s gonna be able to afford a gun, Steve? Even if you’ve got the money, all the guns are in Europe by now.”_

_You sigh. “A knife. What if he’s got a knife?” You’ve got a knife, you want to say, and don’t, because his dad gave it to him and it’s never a good idea to broach that subject._

_He pauses, considers. “If a guy whips out a knife?” He hesitates ae you lean forward, hanging on his words. “If he pulls out a knife, you run real fucking fast in the opposite direction.”_

_You shove him, and he grins at you, and if you let yourself really think about him being gone, maybe forever, it would make you so sick you couldn’t stand._

**\--------------------------------------------------- ******

This time around you strike first. He’s got a gun and an arsenal of assorted knives and that vacant look still, so you don’t give him the opportunity to get the first hit in. The look in his eyes isn’t as far-away and lost as it was when the two of you fought on the bridge. There’s something hot and bitter in his eyes now, you see it as he stumbles into the hellicarrier’s guardrails. Something has happened between this moment and when you saw him last. But for all that Stark implies, you are not stupid, and you are certainly not stupid enough to mistake the feral gleam in his eye for remembrance rather than a deeply-ingrained compulsion to kill.

So, this time around, you strike first. Just like he taught you to.

He dodges most of you punches as handily as before. He shoots at you, lightning quick, and you duck away, but just barely. Every time you land a punch you’re shocked by the metallic hardness of his body, not just his arm. There is blood and scraped flesh all across your knuckles, but even for all of his strength and speed the fight hasn’t drained you yet. From the looks of it, he’s still going strong as well.

_I could do this all day…_

The two of you are flying above the Potomac in a machine designed to commit genocide on the largest scale humanity has ever seen. You are not going to let it live up to that purpose; at the same time, you are not willing to kill him, though you can’t allow him to see this thing to fruition. Which means you will have to get close enough to disarm him, or at least incapacitate him.

_(The two of you fought against another monster like this, once. Sure, it wasn’t a thirty-odd ton death ray. It was one man who’d managed to poison thousands of minds. You both fought against that monster, for yourselves, your country, for each other, and in the process lost what little you’d had before the war. That fighting, that loss, can’t have been for nothing.)_

The monsters never really change at all, you think, as you maneuver and finally get an arm around his neck. Their faces change, the puppet masters change, but it’s always the same thing underneath.

The man in your arms barely feels human anymore. He’s all metal and hard muscle and the kind of quick, mechanical jerks that look natural on one of Stark’s machines, but not on a person. You noticed during the last fight that he’s adopted a certain economy of motion- no punch or jab or kick is ever wasted, every movement designed to maim. A machine for killing, you think, and you remember the old-him, the real him, the languid walk an animal grace, and a wave of sickness washes over you, but you manage to push your forearm hard against his throat.

He struggles hard and manages to wriggle loose again. He’s unearthly fast, and when he snatches the chip it’s so fast you don’t have time to think. You grab hold of his arm and twist it back, hard. It’s his real arm, warm and human, but no more yielding than the metal one. He gasps in pain, but you force yourself not to hear it. The gasp, or the sick crack of snapping bone, as you break his arm with the sheer force of your desperation and fear. You fight back a wave of sickness as the feel of fracturing bone reverberates through your own muscles.

“I have to, Buck, because you weren’t made for this,” you grind out, an apology and a plea. “You’re a hero, Buck. You weren’t made to be a killing machine.”

_You were made to fight monsters like these. With me. ___

Even with a fractured arm he fights with the single-minded intensity of a predatory animal. He thrashes and jabs and kicks until all you can hear is the roar of blood in your veins and the sobbing gasps that the fight is ripping out of you both. Finally, feeling sick and numb, you find an opening and subdue him in the only way you know will work. Your arm trembles as it snakes firmly around his neck. He still struggles and jerks against you, and after what seems like an eternity he tenses and goes limp. He drops to the floor of the hellicarrier. There isn’t time to reprogram the thing, to set the war machine against each other the way the five of you had planned in Fury’s bunker. The two of you may have been struggling for five minutes or five hours. There’s no time to think about him, unconscious and prone, or the way you’d felt his bone snap.

You force yourself to stand. He’s bruised and battered you worse than anything or anyone has since New York and pain shrieks through every muscle as you drag yourself up. Time is running out- you have to change the course. There’s no one else who can stop these things but you. There is no backup, no plan b, no second option. Still, you can’t stop your eyes from drifting down to his unconscious form on the ground, and find that even after that fight, the idea of leaving him is viscerally painful. The two of you were apart for seventy years and more, you remind yourself. Another few minutes aren’t going to break you to pieces. So you leave him, and drag yourself up and away to save the world again, if you can.

Something hot and hard slams into you from behind. It comes so fast that you don’t immediately register that you’ve been shot. There’s a crushing pressure before the pain bleeds through you. As you sink to your knees, back pressed against the console, you think that it’s odd, really, that you’re going to die like this. Not engaged in hand to hand combat with something inhuman, not beneath ten feet of ice. From a nice good old fashioned bullet, like any other guy during the War.

You do not have to wonder who fired the shot. There’s something dripping in your eyes, sweat or maybe blood, so you can’t see him, but there’s only the two of you after all. There’s only ever been the two or you, and maybe it’s fitting that it’ll end like this. He’s saved your life so many times, maybe in the end it’s his to take.

The hellicarrier is falling to pieces around you. Literally falling- even after all these years, the helpless plunge of an aircraft towards earth is a sensation that you recall easily and viscerally. The course has been reset- no one else has to die today. No one but the two of you, and you’ve both cheated death enough that death was bound to catch up with you sooner or later. And if it’s taken seventy years then, well, the part of you that can still appreciate irony should consider you lucky that you’ve come this far. To live past the war, to see him again. To die with him, together. You were meant to live together, and since so damn many things conspired to make that impossible, you deserve at least to die together. The two of you are owed that much.

Pain sears through your chest and the roar and scrape of metal grinding against metal is deafening, but you hoist yourself up. The ship is on a collision course with the Potomac but before it crashes, you are going to find him.

The noise scrambles your brain and the ship’s freefall knocks you around. You are dizzy and dazed and likely bleeding out, but you still have enough presence of mind that you catch the movement out of the corner of your eye. It has to be him- the two of you are the only living things left on the ship. The whole place spins and you fight for balance and feel yourself losing, until what sounds like an exclamation of pain filters through the cacophony and resets your focus. Leaning over a loose rail you can just barely see him pinned under one of the metal beams raining down from the hellicarrier’s rafters.

Blood roars in your head, louder than the scape of metal around you. The muscle that burn and the lungs that heave don’t feel like your own. Nothing is real but the flow of relief as he slips out from under the beam, and the sense of calm that follows the realization that it’s all about to be over, one way or the other, that no matter the outcome, the two of you aren’t going to have to fight anymore.

Unsurprisingly, he’s up and swinging before either or you are able to catch your breaths. Somewhere during the upheaval he seems to have lost his firearms. The brief surge of relief at this is immediately extinguished when that metal arm comes swinging at your face. He’s deadly enough without the weapons. Then again, he always was.

Natasha told you once that she broke whatever hold Loki had on Clint by “knocking his lights out.” Well, you think absently, drunkenly, you managed to choke Bucky unconscious, and the motion of the hellicarrier careening through the air has surely knocked him around as well, and in spite of all that he’s still dead set on killing you. If anything he’s going about the task with a ferocity that you hadn’t seen before, when the two of you’d fought in the street, when you saw his face the first time. He had been smooth, fast, and chillingly efficient. There’s a brokenness to him now, a feral, unhinged quality to the way he fights. It’s written across his face, the quick glances you get of it.

It’s a small matter, really. All three of the ships are disarmed. The danger has past and no one else needs to die today, excluding the two of you. There’s not much left of Bucky but a face and a fist and you, well, you never got the hang of living without him anyway.

Between the pain of the gunshot wound and the exertion of hauling the beam off of him, you haven’t gotten a chance to catch your breath. It takes all of the energy you have left to draw enough air into your lungs to form words, and those words sound distant and dull to your own ears.

“You know me.” His fist whirs by your face and you dodge him, but barely. Those three word are the first things you’ve said to him since 1945, after his name. It is a statement of fact, not a question, and you do not really believe that the words wield enough power to bring him back to himself. Mostly you just want him to know, even if the only part of him that hears and understand is a subconscious that you’ll never be able to truly reach.

All vestiges of control are gone now, and he snarls something at you in answer, but the sound doesn’t register. The look on his face, the raw emotion on it, is so him that his words don’t matter, and even the brutal fist he drives into your solar plexus doesn’t matter quite as much, because he is still in there somewhere, and you can see it. The fire in him, the warmth and life that was him and always had been, is still there. For all their efforts, Hydra couldn’t freeze him all the way through.

His fist strikes you in the face. You taste something hot and salty in your mouth and stumble away from him, bracing on what’s left of a rail. The floor, or most of it, has fallen out from under you. The Potomac wind beneath the hellicarrier, shining white in the sun. Pain and exhaustion have nearly numbed your body, if not your mind, and the trembling arm that reaches behind you to unhook the shield might as well belong to someone else. You hold the shield in front of you for a moment, staring. It has meant the world to you, in its time. It should not be this easy, to toss it down between the jagged ruin of the ship’s foundation. For a moment you watch it fall, blue and red against the river’s white. The decision to drop it wasn’t a conscious one- it is cold fact that you do not need the shield anymore. It belonged to Captain America, and you are not him right now. You are the man who grew from a very small, sickly boy in the center of a sprawling city in a different world, and standing before you is the remnant of the only thing that stood between that boy and despair.

Now he stands between you and a very different way out. He is real, alive, and aching to fight you, and on the face of it he looks so much like he used to that it burns your eyes to look at him. He lunges at you and you barely have the time or inclination to duck away. There is less and less floor to fight on. If he’s hell bent on finishing this one of you is bound to fall, and you cannot bear to see him fall again.

“You’re name is James Buchanan Barnes.” Your lips form the words, but the voice isn’t Captain America’s commanding boom. It’s a desperate, broken plea from Steve Rogers of Brooklyn, and a different time and a different county. Bucky squints at you, eyes wild and angry at nothing. “You’ve known me your whole life.” The words seem to claw their way out of your throat. What you mean to say, but can’t, _is my life began the day I met you, and it ended the day I lost you._

You say, “I am not going to fight you,” and you mean those words with every fiber of your being.

He yells something incomprehensible that is lost over the sound of the hellicarrier’s collapse. You’ve let him get the upper hand (not that you’ve really let him; of all the people and things you’ve fought since the serum, he’s the first to equal you). His fists are pummeling you like a fall of hail, and you could beat him back, if it were in you to do so.

His fist slams into the side of your face. There’s a sickening crunch of bone against bone but the pain itself is essentially an afterthought, because once you’ve blinked the blood and sweat out of your eyes, you are able to focus on his face. And even after everything it is still his face, same as it ever was. Something knocks you in the head, and you’re not sure if it was a blow from his fists or a falling piece of metal. The impact makes you see stars, but beyond the stars is his face, unchanged.

Every bone and muscle seem to grind together, and the bullet wound in your chest is a constant, burning ache, but you are nearly numbed to all of it. You think, _there you are. Here, you’re really here, in 2014, and at the end of the world. In Germany, I fought for you, to get you back. On the plane over the arctic, I fought for you, even though you were gone. In New York, I fought for you, because New York was all I had left of you. Please don’t let me fall._

Your lips move, but you can’t hear any sound that comes out. All that’s left is the way the words feel as your lips form them.

“You’re my friend.”

Above you his face twists with rage and something like fear. “You’re my mission,” he snarls, and slams his metal fist into your face. The pain is a distant thing, something you seem to observe from afar. The blow doesn’t knock you out, not completely, but the aftershocks reverberate through your head and while you are not unconscious, you feel as though you are viewing all of these things from a distance.

His voice, you observe, as though it’s extremely important, is exactly the same. Hydra changed so much about him, but not that. It is the very same voice that teased you as a child, pleaded with you. It is the same one that made so many promises, about how things would be for the two of you after the war.

A painful, burning smile tugs at your ruined lips. Your vision fades, just for a moment, and the light around you both turns from white to gold, and you can remember the feel of his hand on your shoulder, grounding you, reassuring you. Another promise from another life, from the same man. There was violence in him then, even as far back as that, but he held it in check for you, turned it against other people. Always for you.

That day, the day that your mother died and with her so much of your childhood and your past, when he put his hand on your shoulder and told you that you were not alone and that he was and always would be on your side, you should have said “I love you.” Not in the joking way of boys and young men, but in the way that you felt and always had. The two of you had so little time left, though neither of you knew it then.

Your lips struggle to form the words that you should have said to him a lifetime ago. After seventy years, you are going to tell him, because you have already lost him and there is nothing left to lose. His fist hovers in mid-air above your face, and you throw what he said to you on that golden afternoon back at him. It’s not what you meant to say, but it means the same thing.

The look on Bucky’s face, right before you close your eyes, right before you feel something break below you, seems to validate every moment of bitterness and desperate despair that you’ve felt since he was taken from you. He knows you. He know who you are. Even if he forgets again, even if he is broken and rebuilt again, for one moment, he knows you.

You smile and close your eyes. As you fall you catch a final glimpse of his face, and you have just enough time before losing consciousness to pray that, if there is a Heaven, his will be the first face you see.

He doesn’t remember you.

_He will._

You fall, and he does not fall after you.

There are dreams, not unlike the ones that had been your only companions during those years under the ice. They are the kind that you don’t expect to wake from- they become a different sort or existence in and of themselves. In the ice, you’d dreamt of gunfire and Brooklyn and Peggy’s smile, the crack of her fist meeting the heckler’s jaw. Of a hand reaching towards yours, clawing through air and falling away.

This time you don’t dream of ice or the past, but or water, and the future that’s become your home, and a hand that reaches towards yours and finds it, this time.

A day later you wake up. Alive, when you had been utterly convinced that you were going to die. Every inch of you is alive with pain, but alive is the operative word, and in spite of the pain you grin at Sam like an idiot. Because he is here, because you are alive. Because Bucky is alive, somewhere, and inhabits the same world as you, breathes the same air. He walked away, but you will find him.

You ask Sam who found you, and he tells you that you were found on the banks of the river, banged up and half-drowned. And you know with complete certainty that you would have died finally, would be laying at the bottom of the Potomac had someone not pulled you out.

This future that is now your home is full of wonders and nightmares, but also great possibility, and it’s a world that the two of you share now, and there is nowhere in it that he can go where you cannot find him.


	2. velvet moths will keep us warm

Sam agrees to help you find Bucky without a moment’s hesitation. You never tell him with words that it’s your intention to find him, but he intuits it nevertheless and you are deliriously grateful, but not surprised. You have known Sam Wilson for barely two weeks, but the idea of going down this path without him solidly beside you seems inconceivable.

Now, Natasha you’ve known for nearly two years, and as strange as it sounds, the two of you saved the world together. Still, she possesses a seemingly limitless power to surprise you.

She leans back against a squeaky leather seat, eyes intense in the low light of the diner. Natasha is never one to avoid eye contact- it’s something about her that you appreciate that seems to disquiet most everyone else. “A lot of people owe me a lot of favors, Steve,” she says, eyes never wondering from yours. “Not that most of them are reliable, so it’s going to take a while to piece together everything you need to know.” Then she smiles, a warm, real smile, the kind that it’s taken two years to reveal to you. “But scattered puzzle pieces can fit together just fine.”

This would be the proper moment to sigh, relax in your chair, and thank Natasha for being here, doing this, for being a friend after all. Thing is, Natasha is not someone you thank- she communicates more in actions than in words. The fact that she’s offering to help you now instead of getting the hell out of dodge speaks volumes. You clear your throat. “What do you know?”

Her lips quirk to the side. “Other than what we’ve already talked about? Not much. You read the file. But,” she says, reaching deep into a giant canvas bag sitting on the booth beside her, “they had him for the full seventy years, like we thought. What we saw is the tip of the iceberg, pardon the cliché.” With that she tosses an ancient manila folder on the table. This one is huge, thicker than the last one, yellow and cracking with age. Natasha taps her finger on the label on the front of the folder, which you notice absently is in Cyrillic. “Steve, there’s a lot in here that you probably don’t want to know about.” She blinks hard, once, barely perceptible in the low light of the diner. “I’m familiar with people like this. Projects, like this. And there are things in that file that I wish I hadn’t seen. And I only skimmed.”

You nod, slowly. Some of the characters on the front cover are familiar- you wonder absently if they knew or used his name, his real one. It’s surreal- to have been apart from him so long, and to know that everything there is to know about Bucky, what’s happened to him in seventy years between his fall and your fight on the bridge is all in this file. It makes you feel desperately cold and wrong to look at it. To think of what was done to him, to see a man reduced to pieces of paper in a folder. But if you’re going to find him and piece him back together, you have to understand how he’s been broken.

“Uh. Is there anything about his, uh, his arm, in this one?” The last file you’d looked at was little more than an abstract. A cold, objective run-down of the Winter Soldier project. Bucky’s name was only mentioned once, after which he was referred to as “the asset,” or “the American.”

Natasha clears her throat, and looks about as uncomfortable as she’s capable of. “It's not vibranium, like your shield, but the craftsmanship was solid. It’s linked to his central nervous system. Way more than your standard-issue prosthesis. It’s basically a part of his body."

“Why did they do it?” you ask softly. It’s a stupid question and it makes you feel like a child, but it’s crossed your lips before you could help it. “What I mean is, why experiment on him?”

_To get back at me?_

Natasha shrugs. “They had the prototype on the shelf. Then Barnes…appeared.” She shrugs again. _“'Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.'”_

You blink at her. “English?”

“’Let experiment be made on a useless body.'”  


“Bucky wasn’t use-“

She hold up a hand. “Their words, not mine. And before we keep going, you’ve gotta remember rule one: these people are not like you, and they do not think the way that you do. You have to force yourself to think like a Hydra operative. Works with any enemy.”

You suck in a breath to steady yourself. “Okay.”

“What they were specifically referring to was the injury he sustained right after the fall. He landed on his left arm, and it was essentially shattered. After a day it started to bleed into the bone, caused a bad systemic infection. Nearly killed him. It would have, if they hadn’t taken the whole arm.”

It takes everything in you not to shudder. At the end of the day, losing an arm (and gaining another one, you think bleakly) probably doesn’t even crack the top ten in the list of atrocities that they’d committed against Bucky. Still, the idea of him alone among the enemy, in pain… then you remember. “I broke his arm,” you blurt. Natasha raises an eyebrow.

“What, the metal one? How?”

“The real one.” You stare down at the table, focus on a crack in the ancient plastic. “He was trying to put the chip in. To initiate Insight. He wouldn’t drop it, so I had to pull his arm back. Hard. I heard it break.”

Natasha blinks hard at you. “Steve. Don’t. Just, don’t. You did what you had to do. He would have killed you, and millions of people with you. What you fought wasn’t him. It’s not your fault, and it wasn’t his, either. He is what they’ve made him to be.”  
While she’s talking her entire body grows tense. This is not the first time you’ve seen her like this, since New York. It’s as close to a fight stance as she can get while sitting. A sharp sound, a breaking plate or a car back-firing, will make her spring up when she’s like this. You reach out a hand across the table. You don’t try to touch her- you just want to remind her that you’re here, that she’s here. “Natasha?”

She blinks, and just like that, the tension lifts. It always does. “Yeah?”

“Do you think he can come back? From all of this?”

She’s quiet, for a moment. Then a slow, nearly imperceptible smile creeps across her face. “Ah, well. There’s not a lot of things that you can break that can’t be un-broken. I should know.”

 

After Ultron, and after months of no leads, you consider drawing Stark into your two-man-one-woman search party. It’s taken some time, but you’ve saved the world with the man twice now, and even if you don’t trust him quite as much as you trust Sam and Natasha, there’s no doubt in your mind that he’d help if you asked. He’s got access to technology that still blows your mind (granted, microwaves are still something of an enigma to you, but really, robots.) and he probably wouldn’t bat an eyelash at hacking into any number of government databases.

You propose this to Natasha, who laughs. It’s good to hear it- there’s nothing unsteady about her, and she’s still as solid as she ever was, but you’ve noticed a strain about her, since Bruce dropped off the map. It’s a general malaise of the mind you can relate to, intimately.

“Oh, he’d be willing and able, yeah,” Natasha says, taking apart one of her many, many firearms. “But how much of this do you want to go public? I know his heart’s in the rate place, haha, get it?” and she looks up at you, grinning, and you are once again shocked to realize that she really is your friend, this woman who’s past you don’t know, and don’t need to, until she’s willing to share it with you. “But he man’s mouth is almost as big as his ego. Almost.”

So, you drop the idea, but there’s still an intense comfort in knowing that it’s not just you, her, and Sam in this. There’s help if you need it, and you pray that you don’t need it.

 

One night of research that surely breaks at least a dozen federal privacy laws bleeds into a morning of eye strain and exhaustion, with you and Natasha sitting at your kitchen table, drinking stale coffee and too tired to sleep.

You’re trying to give your eyes a rest and she’s staring past you at the sunlight spearing its way through the blinds, and suddenly it seems very surreal to you that she’s hear with you, willing to chase lose ends with you and sacrifice hours of sleep, looking for a man she’s never properly met. Who shot her, you remember, and wince. Lack of sleep and an odd and growing fondness for her loosens your mouth, has you saying things to her that you couldn’t have dreamed of saying a few years ago.

“Do you think I’m crazy? For doing this. Looking for him, like this.”

Natasha leans forward on the table and rests her chin on crossed arms. She doesn’t look at you- her eyes stay fixed on the sunlight that’s creeping towards you both. For an eternity she doesn’t say anything, until you assume what she never heard you at all, and the sudden sound of her voice startles you. “Have you ever seen _Sense and Sensibility _? ”__

____

Surprise and sleep deprivation have a short laugh crawling its way up from your throat. “Um, no. I’ve got a lot of movie catch up to do, or so I’ve been told. I’m barely out of the 70s.”

Natasha smiles, slow, and strangely sad for her. “Well, there’s no way to explain a Jane Austen plot without sounding like an idiot describing a soap opera, so I won’t bother.” She sits up, and leans back, and her eyebrows draw together in concentration. “There’s this line, though, I think it’s even from the book.” She pauses, clears her throat. “’It’s bewitching, the idea of one’s happiness depending entirely on one person.’”

Her voice doesn’t crack, but there’s an edge to it that you can’t help but hear, and you shut your eyes and desperately regret asking her the question. It’s been easy to become focused on your own loss and your desperate search, and easy to forget that you’re not the only one with someone to find.

Natasha sighs, and nods a little, maybe to herself. “And there it is. No. I don’t think you’re crazy, Steve.” She looks up at you for the first time, eyes rimmed with red. She shrugs, lips tilting up in a lopsided smile. “Sometimes it does all hinge on one person. Doesn’t it?”

You clear your throat. “It’s not a weakness,” you say, because you need to, because she needs to hear it.”

She shrugs, and doesn’t say anything for a long time, and closes her eyes. You wonder if she’s fallen asleep, because you’ve both been awake for at least thirty-six hours. The sound of her voice startles you. “What are you going to do when you find him?  
It’s not a question that you expected her to ask. There’s no good answer for it- your life has been a blur and a flash since you’d discovered him alive, and finding him again has been the principal objective. Too much has already happened for you to ask what’s to happen after.

“I don’t know. What are you gonna do, when you find _him?”_

Natasha’s smile is quick and wipes all vestige of weariness from her face. “A lot of things that I should have done a long time ago. Maybe some things that I couldn’t do because of who I am and who he is. A lot’s changed.”

You nod to her, to yourself. “That’s what I’m going to do. When I find Bucky.”

She stares at you for a moment, not in an invasive sort of way. Her smile fades somewhat, but the ghost of it is still there. “What was he to you?”

And that question sucks the air out of the room, somehow. Suddenly your face is too warm and not for the first time you wonder if maybe Natasha isn’t quite human, with her ability to unnerve and undo you with a few words. A simple, simple question. “He was my friend. My best friend. You know that.”

Natasha’s eyebrows knit together. “Yeah?”

_And what else?_ She says, without saying anything at all.

It’s not easy to talk about. None of it is, but this in particular makes you feel like there’s a wait at the base of your throat, choking you into silence. You swallow hard. “That’s all it was,” you say, in response to the question Natasha didn’t ask. “It was the Forties.” 

That’s as much of an explanation as you’re willing to give, especially when you still don’t have the answers.

To her credit, she doesn’t pry. She nods slowly, not looking you in the face. “There’s time,” she says.

 

There is a tracking device in his arm. This is one of the many, many important details that was never mentioned in any of Bucky’s files, which the three of you discovered the hard way. Natasha tells you this based on intel received from one of her very tech savvy and highly disreputable former colleagues. It’s so painfully simple, and you feel like an idiot that it never occurred to you that Hydra would have needed a way to keep tab on him when they set him loose on missions. It has the potential to simplify everything- the possibilities are dizzying.

Natasha’s colleague (“not friend, she tried to sell me to an arms dealer in Yemen a few years back”) is able to track Bucky’s movements since he’s been out of cryostorage this time around. He’d lingered in D.C. for a few days after you last saw him; you’d been unconscious at the time, but the notion that the two of you had been in the same city for roughly forty-eight hours rankles. After that there had been no discernable pattern to his movements. Sam and Natasha had both assumed that he would try to leave the country. The files on him suggest that was rarely… kept (the word they always used was “stored,” and you can’t bring yourself to think of it that way) within the United States. He was unfrozen and assigned to targets in the U.S. a handful of times, but the principal cryostorage facility was in Vladivostok. Luckily for you, he hadn’t tried to go back to Russia, or even left the country, but seemed to be making his way gradually south. Charleston, Atlanta, Tallahassee, then gradually west.

“Maybe he’s headed for Mexico,” Sam suggests one night, sprawled on your couch, completely at ease. You envy him- since Natasha’s tracker found Bucky, you’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to sit still.

“Why Mexico?”

“Out of the country, and easy,” Natasha says from your table. Her face is illuminated by the white glow of the laptop in front of her. 

Her face is fixed in a scowl of concentration as she stares at the screen, furiously scrolling up and down.

“And warm,” Sam adds. “If I’d spent the better part of a century on ice, Mexico would sound pretty damn appealing.”

 

The three of you decide to err on the better side of caution and wait to make a move. It’s been the better part of a century, but there’s a near-physical pain to the waiting. He is out there, somewhere; you could see him, touch him, if you could only find him and make him stay still. Sam points out that the harder you chase him, he more likely it is that he’ll continue to run. And based on his movements, it’s fairly obvious that he is running.

There has to be something, or someone, that he’s hiding from. From the U.S. government, from Hydra, from the scattered remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. for all you know, he could be running from you.

Tracking him has become a nearly-full time job. Between following Bucky’s movements and laying the groundwork for the New Avengers, sleep eludes you most nights, and the tracking screen is often the last thing you see before falling asleep and the first thing you see upon waking. Between then are dreams of him that you can’t (or don’t want to) remember. You watch the little red dot of his tracker drift across the South, finally down to Texas, never remaining in the same place for more than a few hours at a time.  
Until the day that it does.

When you shut your eyes on Saturday night, he is in a back-water down, smack dab on the border between Texas and Louisiana. Like every other town that he’s stopped in, you Googled Sabine Pass, learned everything there is to know about it, from the population density to the relative humidity. Always waiting for the day when he’ll stay put and you’ll be able to go to him. You close your eyes and know that, by morning, he will be on the move again.

On Sunday morning you open your eyes and roll over, groping from your phone. The tracking screen will surely indicate that he’s left Sabine Pass, likely heading west and south. But you bring up the screen and squint at it, blinking, because what you see is surely impossible. It’s been nearly twenty-four hours, and the dot has not moved.

Your mouth goes dry. You refresh the screen, and the dot still has not moved.

A green text box appears at the bottom of your phone screen. Sam: “Still in Texas. Hasn’t moved. Ready when you are.”

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statistically, the sun must shine on the town of Sabine Pass, Texas, but as the three of you drive into it, it’s hard to imagine the place bathed in sunlight. The sky is the color of old concrete and even with the rental car’s AC on full blast your clothes cling to your skin. The town is all worn wood and rusted metal, buildings obviously damaged by years of wind and salt. It has the look of a lace that’s been pummeled by so many Gulf hurricanes that somewhere along the way re-building stopped being worth the effort. Everything is grey and green and tired, and it’s probably the last place Bucky would have ever chosen to hide out, at least back when you’d known him. Which is probably exactly why he’s stayed.

Natasha pulls the car into the gravel parking lot of a tiny bait and tackle shop. The building is mint green with aged wooden paneling, and probably older than you are. The tracker’s been pinging all over town and about twenty miles out. There’s no way to know exactly where he’s staying, so our best bet’s to ask around.”

Sam snickers in the passenger’s seat, leaning forward to inspect the shop. “Do you really want to go in there and ask the proprietor if she’s seen a guy with a metal arm and a thousand yard stare come in to buy night crawlers in the last week?”

Natasha smirks at Sam before glancing back at you. “Nope, that’s the last thing I want to do, which is why Steve’s going to do it.”

You shrug as you unbuckle your seatbelt. At this point you’re more than willing to humiliate yourself and anyone you know if it helps you track him down. It’s surreal, to be this close to him.

The bait-and-tackle, as it turns out, is Sabine Pass’s only game in town. It’s an all-purpose convenience store with a flickering fluorescent light overhead, cracked linoleum, and a bleach smell that nearly covers up the smell of old fish. Tucked into the corner is the first payphone you’ve seen since 1945.

The middle-aged woman at the counter doesn’t look up from her fat paperback novel when the three of you walk in. You glance over at Sam and Natasha. “Buy something,” Sam mouths. Strike up a conversation, provide an opening for the series of suspicious questions you need to ask. You grab a magazine without looking at it and Natasha grabs an energy shot. She sets it loudly on the counter. The cashier, who’s vaguely orange skin and colorless half make her exact age difficult to place, doesn’t look up from her novel. “Did y’all find everything alright?” The words all run together and for several embarrassing seconds you stare at her, before Natasha nudges you. “Yes,” you say dully. You can feel Sam wince beside you.

The cashier rings you up with an ancient scanner. She, and everything in this place, seems to move in slow motion. Though your optimism is wavering, you clear your throat, and pray that the stereotype about small town folks being loose-lipped is true. “Uh. If I, meaning, us three, the three of us, were wanting to rent property out here. Seasonal. Do you happen to know who around here we could talk to?” Your mouth is dry, and Natasha is never going to let you live this down. Leading armies, fighting goddamn aliens and robots is fine, making casual conversation with disinterested Texan cashiers is not.

She sighs. Slowly. “Uh. In town, or out around Sea Rim?”

This is heartening: she didn’t tell you to go to hell. “By Sea Rim.” You’d researched the park are length. If the website and Google Maps searches could be believed, Sea Rim Park was twenty miles of sea grass bordered on both sides by the Gulf of Mexico, dotted with the occasional beach house.

If you didn’t want to be found, and you can only assume that Bucky does not want to be found, Sea Rim Park would be a damn good place to hide. No one and nothing for miles.

The cashier deposits your magazine on the counter, flips it over, and writes a name and phone number on it with a fading Sharpie. “This ain’t Padre,” she says. “Hell, ain’t even Bolivar. Not a lot of places for rent. Not sure why you’d want to.” She eyes the three of you suspiciously. “Ben Galloway owns all the places out around Sea Rim. All three of them. Give him a call.”

 

The plain stretches out into nothingness. It’s a literal sea of grass, nearly colorless, and it melts into the colorless sky. Yours is the only car on Highway 87 for as far as you can see. According to the map, most of the road had been washed away during one of the most recent hurricanes. Like so many things on the Gulf Coast, no one had bothered to repair it. Why bother fixing something that was destined to be re-broken, destroyed over and over?

You pass the occasional trailer, small groups of them that may pass as neighborhoods. The sky is a flat, washed out grey consumes all color on the horizon. You try to focus on the strangeness of the landscape, the way the plain stretches forever like water, and the way the sky is a broken promise of rain, the way the rental car’s transmission shudders. It’s easier to focus on these things than to really think hard about the fact that he is at the end of this road. Again, he is so, so close to you. But closeness, you remind yourself bitterly, doesn’t necessarily translate to something that you can reach out and touch. On the hellicarrier during the fight you had touched him, felt skin and metal, but he’d been so far away from you. He could not have been farther from you.

But he had still pulled you from the water.

You blink hard at the sky.

This road will end, and he will be at the end of it. In a brown house on stilts, like the rest of them in the area, with a blue tarp on the south-facing side of the roof, flanked on two sides by saltwater cedars.

And a beat-up, black pickup truck in the gravel driveway.

“Ugliest damn car I ever saw, and you could hear it comin’ a mile away,” Ben Galloway had said on the phone. He’d had a coughing fit partway through your conversation and you’d waited patiently as he’d caught his beneath, even as the plastic of your cell creaked under your iron grip. “That damn trucks gotta be older than he is.”

Even with your heart racing so fast it hurt, you had to smile at that. Considering.

Galloway had been curiously forthcoming when you’d called to ask about who was renting the most remote, vacant house out in Sea Rim. You’d told him some tale about how your good for nothing brother-in- law had waltzed out on your little sister, and you wanted to talk to him, and thought he’d come out this way. Galloway wouldn’t give you the name, he said, but he could give a description. Tall guy, he’d said. Ex-military, he’d guessed, based on the dog tags, and the way he was built under the layers of clothes he was wearing, in spite of the humidity. Rolled in just four days before. “Polite, but just barely,” Galloway had croaked, coughing. “Some kinda Yankee accent. Also had some sort of sling or splint or something on his right arm.” Paid in cash, only two weeks’ worth.

Something cold and hard balled up in your chest when you’d heard that. Yep, you’d said, that sounds like your good for nothing brother-in- law, damn his rotten hide. You weren’t gonna hurt him, just haul him back to Houston to face your sister like a man. Galloway had laughed and wished you well.

When you think about Bucky’s arm in a sling, you grip the wheel so hard you feel it give somewhat under the pressure.

Blood rushes into your ears and if you were sane you’d turn the car around and head back down 87, back to Sam and Natasha, who'd you'd left at a motel in Port Arthur, and leave Bucky alone. It’s clearly what he wants, to be alone. Why else would he have run from you?

Why would he have left you on the shores of the Potomac, if he didn’t want to be away from you? Would it be kinder, to leave him to this?

The thing is, you think as you grip the steering wheel and fix your eyes straight ahead, there is only so much that can be expected of one person. You’ve devoted yourself to Right, whatever that means, and the Right thing to do would be to respect Bucky’s wishes. But you’ve crossed the threshold, and that is not a sacrifice you’re willing to make. Not even for him. He may never remember that he loved you once, for all that meant, back when you were just Steve-from-Brooklyn, with a chronic cough and joints that ached in the cold, and him. You will find him, and he may hate you, and try again to kill you. This time, you may even let him, but he will see you, and know you. And know that he is the only thing you cannot bring yourself to be parted with, even if it kills you.

 

The rental car’s tires crunch roughly on the gravel driveway. The ancient brown beach house with the blue tarp on the roof looms in front of you, as promised, flanked by saltwater cedars. Somewhere behind it is the Gulf of Mexico, a thing you can feel but haven’t yet seen. The closeness to the sea thickens the air with salt. For a few moments you stare at the house, at the ancient black pickup truck, and a longing as thick as the air threatens to drown you. The hands that quit shaking long enough to unbuckle the seatbelt do not feel like your hands and it takes everything you have to step out into the air. 

The plain is unnaturally still and would be almost deafeningly quiet were it not for the low, tender roar of waves in the distance. The sound of your shoes on gravel is too loud. It takes no time at all for your clothes to cling to your skin in this weather.  
You are ten, maybe twelve, feet from the door. He is behind that door, somewhere, and you fight to draw thick salt air into your lungs. The door is right in front of you, and you reach out to turn the handle, shocked to find it unlocked. Why bother locking a door when you can kill virtually anyone or anything with your bare hands? 

Inside the house is dark and dank, infused all the way through with salt and decay, like all houses built to close to the sea. There is an old mirror directly in front of the door, glass cracked and spotted with salt deposits. There are high-windowed rooms on either side of the entrance, and no furniture. It does not have the feel of a house that has been inhabited in recent memory. You are not sure what you expected- Bucky is staying her, not living here. The pervasive heat and humidity suggests that he hadn’t even bothered to turn the air conditioner on. 

The place is two stories, but compact. This is something of a blessing: there are not many places for him to be hiding, assuming that he’s in the house at all. 

There may be nothing to gain, but there is also nothing to lose. You clear your throat. “Buck. Where are you?” Your voice echoes through the empty entry way. Somewhere there is a soft, wooden creak, that may or may not have been imagined. 

Nothing. 

Directly across from the door there is an ancient staircase, bathed in dusty sunlight from a window above it. The wooden steps creak ominously under your weight, threatening to give way. When you reach the top the soles of your shoes nearly sink into the green shag carpet that begins after the first step. “Buck?” you croak again. The clouds of dust or his name make your throat ache. “Are you-“

The fist that slams into the side of your head is brutal and fast and not entirely unexpected. But in spite of everything your training doesn’t fail you, and in half a breath you have his fist clenched in your own. The house is dark, but you still catch the metallic sheen of his arm as he whips away from you. 

He’s still fast, terribly fast, but slower than he was when you fought last. He flattens himself against the wall, panting, and even in the dark you can see that he’s cut his hair some and that he’s holding the arm you wrenched close to his body, hanging outside of the sling around his neck. The stab of guilt aches like a physical pain, but it fades quickly, lost in the surge of relief that makes your vision blur. 

From the moment the tracker in his arm had stayed in one place and you knew you could find him, you’d been expecting this fight, this moment. And this feeling like falling, the sense that he might disappear again if your eyes wonder away. Like he doesn’t really exist anymore, if you aren’t looking directly at him. You fix your eyes on him like a target; you can’t see them well in the low-light, but you could pick them out of a crowd. 

Bucky’s eyes never wonder from yours. The coldness, you note, nearly delirious, is gone. The unconscious, robot hate is gone. The threat and tension is still there: he is looking at you like prey. “Why?” he grinds out through clenched teeth. “Why were you looking for me?”

The answer is on your lips before you have time to think, to process. “I always should have looked for you. After you…I didn’t. But I should’ve.” 

He edges farther away from you, closer to the window. Watery light seeps through the aged glass but it provides just enough illumination for you to see him better. He’s dressed in jeans, like you, and a plain black t-shirt. He looks so normal, so like him, so like he used to, that you nearly forget that you aren’t home with him. Home, to you, is still New York, still Brooklyn. With him.  
Bucky’s eyes wonder over you quickly before darting up to meet yours. “There was nothing to find,” he says flatly. 

A sharp laugh claws its way out of your throat. “Don’t be a fucking moron,” you say, maybe more sharply than you ought to. You move closer to him, slowly, not really caring about what he’ll do to you now. He is alive and he is here and he remembers you. He knows who you are. There was everything to find, you want to say, and would say, if your throat didn’t feel like it’s closing off. 

He keeps his eyes fixed on yours, but he sinks slowly to the carpet, back pressed against the wall. “Why?” he repeats brokenly. His shoulders are shaking slightly. “I tried to kill you. I would have killed you.”

You sink to your knees, because if you don’t touch him you feel like you might die right there at his feet. “You saved my life,” you say, voice scraping your own throat like glass. Your hand reaches out and finds his knee, and there’s only denim between your skin and his. You feel like your face is on fire and it occurs to you that you haven’t cried in front of him since you were nineteen and your mother’s test came back positive and you knew she wouldn’t last a year. Tears pour hotly down your face. “You saved my life,” you say again, as though it’ll penetrate better. 

He flinches at your touch, but he doesn’t move away from you. “But. I-“

“Shut up,” you snap, and your face is maybe an inch from his, and the distances of all those years and miles closes in a second, “shut up, just.” Your other hand comes up, trembling, to pull him closer, and you crush your lips on his before he has a chance to open his mouth again. 

He could push you away. He could leap up, right now, and break your neck in one fluid motion. He doesn’t do any of these things. Instead he presses his mouth back firmly against yours. Your teeth knock together painfully, but then again, it is the first time either of you has kissed anyone in seventy years. 

You had never really formulated a plan for this moment. What you would say to him, do to him, once he was found. Perhaps you had not seen this coming, but as his hand, the metal one, comes to tangle in your hair with startling tenderness, you know innately that this is what you had come for all along, that you might not have accepted anything less than this. You are both twice the men you were in 1945, before he fell and you froze, and if you are strong enough to come back from everything you are certainly strong enough to close the circle that formed on a playground lifetimes ago, when you were children. 

The two of you could not have had this, back then. 

The two of you are shaking so hard that you wonder absently if the ground itself is shaking, if a tsunami is coming to drag you both out to sea. Bucky’s lips are chapped but in spite of everything (or maybe because of everything) he is pliable under your hands. His hand, the flesh and blood hand, has snaked it’s way up the back of your shirt and you could die right now, the house could fall down around you, and every agonizing second of the last seventy years would be worth it. 

Finally your vision starts to blur and your chest aches and you have to pull back from him to breathe, though pulling away hurts. He’s clutching at you now like a lifeline, and you are both gasping for air, and the smile splits your face so hard it hurts. His face is blurry through your tears, but it is his face, the one that you’ve always known, and you take it firmly between your hands. Blood roars so loud in your head that you can barely hear your own words. “Wanna know why I looked for you?” you ask, still breathless. “Because you saved my life, Buck. Over and over and over again. Before you pulled me out of the river.” You pause, searching his face, letting your eyes and your hands wonder over him. So much is different, and so much hasn’t changed at all. “You saved me from so damn many fights,” you grind out, words catching on a laugh that turns to a sob. You crush your mouth onto his again so hard you taste blood, then pull back again. “You taught me how to fight. Remember? You taught me how to be Captain America.”

He blinks hard at you and shakes his head. “I didn’t,” he says, voice unchanged after all these years. “C’mon, Steve. It was you. It was always you.”

You shake your head. “Then in New York…you’ve heard about all that? Before that, I didn’t really care if I lived or died. Maybe I wanted to die, a little, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.” Bucky winces at that and you continue, breathless. “But they attacked our city, Buck, and I couldn’t let that happen. And the whole time I thought of you, and all the people that we both knew that lived there, and I saw you on the docks and on the streets and on the fire escapes and I had to win. We had to win, for you.” For me. “And I was pretty sure I was going to die. But you were the light at the end of the tunnel.”

He laughs at that, his old raucous laugh, and you swat at him without even thinking about it, because some things can’t change. “What the hell have you been reading?” he asks, still snorting with laughter. There’s still a brokenness to him, but he shines through so bright it could burn you. 

It doesn’t stop you from shoving him again. “Buck, listen. I mean it. I really thought, for the first time since I was sick, that I was going to die. And it was like walking straight into hell, but it was okay, because if I lived I lived, and if I didn’t, well. There was you, so I couldn’t lose.” 

He doesn’t say anything to that, just blinks at you with the same blue eyes that have haunted nearly every dream and nightmare for years. The same eyes that graced every memory of your past. He looks straight into your eyes, and sees you. 

There is still far to go, but Bucky is with you, and sees you, and you are invincible again.

**Author's Note:**

> Yikes, guys, it took me two bloody years to post this. Two. Years. Obviously it's not Civil War compliant. More to come either tonight or tomorrow.
> 
> This is my first fic, which is probably abundantly obvious. Please forgive the second-person POV, I'm Hunger Games Trash™. Thanks for reading, and I hope we're all looking foward to hours of disgusting sobbing over these two after we see the new movie. <3
> 
> What is even the plot of this? We Just Don't Know.
> 
> (Title/epigraph from Fever Ray's "Keep The Streets Empty")


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